Monday, November 16, 2009

Having mentioned in the previous post the always-valuable work of Ann Blair, I think I’ll add a reference to an article of hers on the history of note-taking. I am not sure whether this is freely available online — I get access to a lot of stuff when I’m using the college internet connection that I can’t get at home, thanks to wise expenditures by our excellent reference staff — but here’s the link and here’s a sample:

More widespread than techniques associated with particular professions were the note-taking methods taught in schools. From earliest antiquity teaching was mostly dispensed orally; what we know of ancient teaching is largely dependent on the notes that listeners took. What we call the works of Aristotle, for example, are thought to be mostly composed from student notes. Different forms of notes would have resulted from different teaching settings: for example, the acroamatic, major works from lecturing, and the problemata, with their multiple answers to questions, from a more discussion-oriented kind of teaching. One seventeenth-century teacher concluded that note taking must have been practiced even by the followers of the prisca sapientia famous for their reliance on memory and their contempt of writing: “How else would their writings survive to us?...They wrote on all kinds of things: they used wax, wood, cloth, bark, tree leaves, lead, skins, and palimpsests. We most conveniently use paper and rejoice in the printers; this way of writing is so easy that leisure is not more pleasant than work.” No doubt this rational reconstruction of ancient note taking is a better indicator of attitudes in the seventeenth century than among the Pythagoreans. But the point is well taken: only those teachings that were committed to writing at some point have survived. Historians too might consider the extent to which note taking played a role in the transmission of learning even in a period noted for its cultivation of memory — indeed note taking was long perceived as a powerful aid to memory.

In general we have insufficient evidence to reconstruct the specifics of the classroom experience from antiquity through the Early Modern period, and certainly we can expect it to have varied. Medieval lectures were not simply dictations; students came equipped with a manuscript version of the text being discussed and might not always have needed to take notes. From the sixteenth century we have printed school texts abundantly annotated in the margins and on interleaved pages with commentary that was likely dictated in the classroom and copied over neatly after the fact in the printed book. In one example from 1629 in Paris students in the same class came away with full-text notes from a course on geography, identical but for aural mistakes; the entire text of this extracurricular course was evidently provided by dictation. 150 years later student notes of Kant's lectures on anthropology were circulated and sold as complete versions of his lectures. How exactly these notes (now extant only in later copies) were produced by listening students is a matter of some speculation. The students may have used forms of abbreviation and condensing (stenography was only developed for German in 1834); students may also have worked together to each take down successive sentences of the lecture, following a method first devised by pietistic preacher August Hermann Francke (1663-1727) and which he called a Schreibechor or writing chorus. Indeed it would be helpful to study as a parallel to note taking in lectures the tradition of note taking during sermons. The written reportationes of medieval sermons produced by listeners were not a verbatim transcription of the oral sermon but rather a reconstruction based on schematic notes. Judging from the elaborate solution attributed to August Hermann Francke, we can surmise that note taking at the Sunday sermon was a common practice centuries later among German pietists.

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Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, generally, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what's fun?